Williams Suspended for Horse Collar Tackle on McNabb

The Cowboys will be without safety Roy Williams on Sunday, as the horse collar tackling has finally caught up with him. Monday the league handed Williams a one-game suspension for his third such tackle, this time yesterday vs the Eagles and Donovan McNabb in the teams 10-6 loss. Williams will sit Saturday night’s game at Carolina against the Panthers, and will in turn lose his game check of $37,187.

“He’s real strong, especially with his hands. You go to your strength, so he’s going to grab somebody with his hands,” Cowboys coach Wade Phillips said Monday, before the suspension was handed down. “And the way it is now, they tape those jerseys in the back, so you can’t grab them, you can’t hold on to them. The only thing you can grab is something behind him. And he’s coming from behind, he has to learn to lay out. But what he’s used to doing is grabbing them, because he’s so strong with his hands. He hasn’t been able to break that habit, obviously.”

The tackle on McNabb was the third time this season that Williams horse collared a player, and it was the fourth rule violation by Williams of the rule in the past two seasons. Overall, he’s already been fined a total of $37,500 for breaking the rules on the tackles. “It wasn’t against the rules until a couple years ago,” Phillips said. “But that’s the rule and we need to abide by it. He just going to have to learn to do it different. And he passed it up a couple times in that game.”

Bottom line is the league is going to keep handing down the punishments on Williams as long as he keeps breaking the rules. He keeps hurting players (just ask Terrell Owens), and as long as he keeps doing it, he’s going to find himself time after time getting fined and suspended. The rule was set in place for a reason, and it’s time that Williams starts to abide by it.